Suggestibility is correlated with intelligence negatively, meaning that less intelligent people are more suggestible. There always be the sufficient number of the suggestible subjects whose voting preferences can be influenced by the specially designed, still very much mysterious and unclear in all its aspects and effects, “psychographic”, individually tailored, targeted advertising, the type that is skillfully used and practiced by the Cambridge Analytica. “Psychotronic weapon” quality which probably implies more forceful and aggressive yet more subtle suggestions, is the concern that has to be thoroughly investigated. It might be used in all or many hostile online manipulations, including the inciting to mass shootings or staging the accidents.

These considerations cannot be easily dismissed (or can be at this society’s peril) and should be adopted as the part of the valid investigative hypothesis.

Last Wednesday, 11 months into Donald Trump’s new world order, in the first year of normalisation, a sudden unblurring of lines took place. A shift. A door of perception swung open.

Because that was the day that the dramatis personae of two separate Trump-Russia scandals smashed headlong into one another. A high-speed news car crash between Cambridge Analytica and Wikileaks, the two organisations that arguably had the most impact on 2016, coming together last week in one head-spinning scoop.

That day, we learned that Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data firm that helped Trump to power, had contacted Julian Assange to ask him if he wanted “help” with Wikileaks’s stash of stolen emails.

That’s the stash of stolen emails that had such a devastating impact on Hillary Clinton in the last months of the campaign. And this story brought Wikileaks, which the head of the CIA describes as a “hostile intelligence service”, directly together with the Trump campaign for which Cambridge Analytica worked. This is an amazing plot twist for the company, owned by US billionaire Robert Mercer, which is already the subject of investigations by the House intelligence committee, the Senate intelligence committee, the FBI and, it was announced late on Friday night, the Senate judiciary committee.

So far, so American. These are US scandals involving US politics and the news made the headlines in US bulletins across US networks.

But it’s also Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics company, which has its headquarters in central London and that, following a series of articles about its role in Brexit in the Guardian and the Observer, is also being investigated, by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office. The company that was spun out of a British military contractor, is headed by an old Etonian and that responded to our stories earlier this year by threatening to sue us. It’s our Cambridge it’s named after, not the American one, and it was here that it processed the voter files of 240 million US citizens.

It’s also here that this “hostile intelligence service” – Wikileaks – is based. The Ecuadorian embassy is just a few miles, as the crow flies, from Cambridge Analytica’s head office. Because this is not just about America. It’s about Britain, too. This is transatlantic. It’s not possible to separate Britain and the US in this whole sorry mess – and I say this as someone who has spent months trying. Where we see this most clearly is in that other weird Wikileaks connection: Nigel Farage. Because that moment in March when Farage was caught tripping down the steps of the Ecuadorian embassy was the last moment the lines suddenly became visible. That the ideological overlaps between Wikileaks and Trump and Brexit were revealed to be not just lines, but a channel of communication.

This is a power network that involves Wikileaks and Farage, and Cambridge Analytica and Farage, and Robert Mercer and Farage. Steve Bannon, former vice president of Cambridge Analytica, and Farage. It’s Nigel Farage and Brexit and Trump and Cambridge Analytica and Wikileaks… and, if the Senate intelligence committee and the House intelligence committee and the FBI are on to anything at all,

somewhere in the middle of all that, Russia.

Try to follow this on a daily basis and it’s one long headspin: a spider’s web of relationships and networks of power and patronage and alliances that spans the Atlantic and embraces data firms, thinktanks and media outlets. It is about complicated corporate structures in obscure jurisdictions, involving offshore funds funnelled through the black-box algorithms of the platform tech monopolists. That it’s eye-wateringly complicated and geographically diffuse is not a coincidence. Confusion is the charlatan’s friend, noise its accessory. The babble on Twitter is a convenient cloak of darkness.

Yet it’s also quite simple. In a well-functioning democracy, a well-functioning press and a well-functioning parliament would help a well-functioning judiciary do its job. Britain is not that country. There is a vacuum where questions should be, the committees, the inquiries, the headlines on the TV bulletins. What was Nigel Farage doing in the Ecuadorian embassy? More to the point: why has no public official asked him? Why is he giving speeches – for money – in the US? Who’s paying him? I know this because my weirdest new hobby of 2017 is to harry Arron Banks, the Bristol businessman who was Ukip and Leave.EU’s main funder, and Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s comms man and Belize’s trade attache to the US, across the internet late at night. Wigmore told me about this new US venture – an offshore-based political consultancy working on Steve Bannon-related projects – in a series of tweets. Is it true? Who knows? Leave.EU has learned from its Trumpian friends that black is white and white is black and these half-facts are a convenient way of diffusing scandal and obscuring truth.

(You got this? Farage visited Trump, then Assange, then Rohrabacher. Rohrabacher met Don Trump’s Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Then Assange. And is now trying to close the circle with Trump.)

In these post-truth times, journalists are fighting the equivalent of a firestorm with a bottle of water and a wet hankie. We desperately need help. We need public pressure. We need parliament to step up and start asking proper questions. There may be innocent answers to all these questions. Let’s please just ask them.

Russian Trolls Would Love the ‘Honest Ads Act’Bloomberg
The idea is to make online platforms store all the political ads — both those that support specific candidates and those dealing with issues of national importance — so that the public could access them and see how they were targeted. Another …and more »

The History of Russian Involvement in America’s Race WarsThe Atlantic
The trolls, according to an interview with the Russian TV network TV Rain, were directed to focus their tweets and comments on socially divisive issues, like guns. But another consistent theme has been Russian trolls focusing on issues of race. Some of …

We’ve all been awaiting Donald Trump’s inevitable response to the news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has filed Trump-Russia criminal charges, and that the arrests of Trump’s people will begin tomorrow. Now we’re finally seeing that response, and while it’s as unhinged as expected, it’s also a rather desperate cry for help. Trump is so panicked, he’s begging his remaining allies to “DO SOMETHING!” to save him.

Here’s what Trump tweeted on Sunday morning: “Never seen such Republican ANGER & UNITY as I have concerning the lack of investigation on Clinton made Fake Dossier (now $12,000,000?) ,the Uranium to Russia deal, the 33,000 plus deleted Emails, the Comey fix and so much more. Instead they look at phony Trump/Russia, “collusion,” which doesn’t exist. The Dems are using this terrible (and bad for our country) Witch Hunt for evil politics, but the R’s are now fighting back like never before. There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out. DO SOMETHING!”

As usual, not one word of Trump’s Twitter rant is factually accurate or true. But it does reveal just how severely he’s now panicking. He’s not threatening to do anything, or vowing to take any action. Like the anti-leader that he is, Trump is begging others to “do something” to save him. It might be a little late on that front, with Mueller set to arrest one or more of his Russia co-conspirators tomorrow. But Trump wasn’t done, as he added one more tweet which revealed just who it is he’s hoping will save him.

Trump tweeted “All of this “Russia” talk right when the Republicans are making their big push for historic Tax Cuts & Reform. Is this coincidental? NOT!” In other words, he’s publicly reminding the Republican Congress that it needs to protect him a bit longer if it wants to be able to pass its tax giveaway scam for the wealthy. However, it may be past the point where anyone is even willing to try to save him.

We’ve all been awaiting Donald Trump’s inevitable response to the news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has filed Trump-Russia criminal charges, and that the arrests of Trump’s people will begin tomorrow. Now we’re finally seeing that response, and while it’s as unhinged as expected, it’s also a rather desperate cry for help. Trump is so panicked, he’s begging his remaining allies to “DO SOMETHING!” to save him.Here’s what Trump tweeted on Sunday morning: “Never seen such Republican ANGER & UNITY as I have concerning the lack of investigation on Clinton made Fake Dossier (now $12,000,000?) ,the Uranium to Russia deal, the 33,000 plus deleted Emails, the Comey fix and so much more. Instead they look at phony Trump/Russia, “collusion,” which doesn’t exist. The Dems are using this terrible (and bad for our country) Witch Hunt for evil politics, but the R’s are now fighting back like never before. There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out. DO SOMETHING!”

As usual, not one word of Trump’s Twitter rant is factually accurate or true. But it does reveal just how severely he’s now panicking. He’s not threatening to do anything, or vowing to take any action. Like the anti-leader that he is, Trump is begging others to “do something” to save him. It might be a little late on that front, with Mueller set to arrest one or more of his Russia co-conspirators tomorrow. But Trump wasn’t done, as he added one more tweet which revealed just who it is he’s hoping will save him.

Trump tweeted “All of this “Russia” talk right when the Republicans are making their big push for historic Tax Cuts & Reform. Is this coincidental? NOT!” In other words, he’s publicly reminding the Republican Congress that it needs to protect him a bit longer if it wants to be able to pass its tax giveaway scam for the wealthy. However, it may be past the point where anyone is even willing to try to save him.

Imagine if Special Counsel Robert Mueller finds sufficient evidence to charge President Donald Trump, but his hands are tied because he or the Department of Justice concludes that they cannot indict a sitting President? Could Mueller instead identify President Trump by name as an unindicted coconspirator when bringing charges against other individuals? The stakes are enormously high. Such action would have some of the same reverberations across the country as a criminal indictment of the President.

A facile answer would rely simply on the fact that the Special Prosecutor in Watergate did just that. The Watergate grand jury named President Richard M. Nixon as an unindicted coconspirator when it issued indictments of others.

Since Watergate, however, the Department of Justice has developed guidance for criminal prosecutions that places a presumption against naming individuals as unindicted coconspirators. TheU.S. Attorneys Office Manual states:

In the absence of some significant justification, federal prosecutors generally should not identify unindicted coconspirators in conspiracy indictments. The practice of naming individuals as unindicted coconspirators in an indictment charging a criminal conspiracy has been severely criticized in United States v. Briggs, 514 F.2d 794 (5th Cir. 1975).

The rationale behind this rule is that it is generally unfair for the government to tag people with the marker of criminality without an opportunity to defend themselves in court.

That said, the prohibition expressed in the US Attorneys Manual is not categorical. The Manual says it applies in the absence of some significant justification and that federal prosecutors generally should not identify unindicted conspirators in the indictment. And later the Manual says Ordinarily, there is no need to name a person as an unindicted coconspirator in an indictment.

These are no ordinary times, and the question here is whether the case of Donald Trump could provide a significant justification for naming him in the indictment, just as the Watergate grand jury did in the case of Nixon.

The norm about not naming unindicted coconspirators is sufficiently strong that one has to fully acknowledge the rationale and attendant difficulties. With that in mind, the case of the President is an occasion that could be narrowly cabined and where naming may be most appropriate.

At bottom, this is an area controlled not by categorical rules. Instead, it involves different risks and factors that must be weighed at different stages of the criminal process. Before trial, for example, the Attorneys Manual recognizes that the prosecution may identify unindicted coconspirators in a bill of particulars if requested by the defense. In that event, the Manual says prosecutors should generally (read: not always) try to file such documents under seal, and should not appeal any court order directing them to file publicly. At trial, a specificexception to hearsay allows prosecutors to identify and enter statements by named unindicted coconspirators. At these junctures before and during trial, the interests of defendants to know the details of the governments case against them and the interest of the government to prove its case can outweigh an unindicted coconspirators reputational interests in keeping her identity secret. The balance of equities also includes the press and publics interest in knowledge about the case. Federal courts, for example, have held that the public interest in disclosureoutweighs the privacy interests of the coconspirators in such instances. At least until 2013, the Justice Departments Antitrust Division named unindicted coconspirators in plea agreements and justified those actions as necessary to inform the public. The question then boils down to whether the balance of factors supports Muellers having this option at his disposal in this case. It does. Lets see why.

I. Deciding when its appropriate to exercise the option

If there were ever a need to make an exception to the presumption against identifying an unindicted coconspirator, Muellers investigation could be it. Simply put, a case in which two conditions exista person is immune from prosecution but theres a strong public interest in knowing about their actionscan provide ample justification.

Inability to indict Recall that the U.S. Attorneys Office Manual refers to the federal court decision United States v. Briggs (5th Cir. 1975) for having severely criticized the governments identifying unindicted coconspirators in that case. The Fifth Circuit judges, however, rested their opinion, in significant part, on the idea that the government had the option of simply indicting such individualsand the failure to do so thus appeared unfair. The Briggs court said, the indictment may make such additional persons defendants if there is probable cause to believe that they participated in the alleged conspiracy. We have been tendered no reason why in this case, if there was probable cause, the appellants were not included among those made defendants. The Briggs holding was based on the fact that the government did not have a good replywhy couldnt the government just indict the conconspirators too?

Take the option of indictment awayif the person is immunewhat do you have left? Following Briggs, a federal court allowed the government to name a coconspirator on the theory that the government could not actually indict the person. He was dead. Thats a bit of an extreme case, but like a hypothetical in a law school classroom it helps illustrate the point. And, indeed, the federal judge in that case explained that the situation stood for a broader principle where the person named as an unindicted coconspirator simply cannot be indicted and tried. More to the point, the court explained other specific cases in which there would be good reason to name the person in an indictment including when an unindicted coconspirator enjoys diplomatic immunity.

Strong public interest Another factor that distinguishes the Briggs ruling and the potential case of President Trump involves the governments interest in naming him. In Briggs, the court found nosubstantial government justification, a veritable empty set to weigh against the unindicted individuals interests. The Fifth Circuit court said:

The Department of Justice suggests nothing that rises to the dignity of a substantial interest. The Department does state in conclusory terms that the interest of justice may on occasion require that (unindicted conspirators) be named in the indictment. These interests of justice are not identified.

In a later case, the Fifth Circuit would later say that, in addressing the merits in Briggs, this Court made absolutely clear that that no legitimate function was served by naming and accusing an individual of a crime without indicting that individual as a defendant.

In Muellers case of naming the President there are substantial, easily articulable functions and intereststhe general one of the publics right to know is at its maximum here andCongress is waiting to know what Mueller thinks about Trumps involvement. Indeed, it would be mighty difficult to square Muellers assignment with the idea that he cannot say whether the President committed a crime. The provisions for the Special Counsel, for example, give Mueller jurisdiction to investigate obstruction of justice and the public understanding is that he is, indeed, charged to investigate that matter and the matter of potential criminal wrongdoing in the Trump campaign no matter how high up it leads. In short, Muellers responsibility, best understood, includes determining whether Trump is guilty. And even the Presidents own lawyers effectively acknowledged this fact, for example, in their efforts to clear the President by trying to set up an interview with Mueller. Having entrusted the Special Counsel with this solemn responsibility, it would make sense why Mueller should not have to wait for a defendant to request a bill of particulars or some opportunity like entering hearsay evidence if and when it finally comes to trial. At the very least it is safe to say that Mueller can clearly present a public interest that rises to the dignity of a substantial interest, far above what the court ask for in Briggs.

Finally, what about the general concern of naming someone in an indictment without their having a proper forum to respond? This is a valid and important issue, which lies at the heart of the general presumption against this sort of action. However, the President has a powerful platform unlike any other to respond to reputational concerns and defend his name. Whats more, a lack of forum cant be a decisive factor since individuals can be unmasked at trial (for example, under the hearsay exception) where they stillwhere they would not have the ability to vindicate themselves. And before a trial starts, even the Briggs court recognized that [a]n unindicted conspirator anonymously designated as an other person or as John Doe may be unmasked in a bill of particulars or at trial. That said, Briggs thought it was less injurious to be named in a bill of particulars or as a witness:

The bill of particulars is, however, the statement of the prosecutor and does not carry the imprimatur of credibility that official grand jury action does. When a witness testifies at trial he does so as a private individual and makes no formal adjudication regarding criminality.

But we should not elevate form over substance. Any such differences should be acknowledged in the balance of factors. One could cogently argue that the publics interest in knowing that a federal grand jury has amassed evidence of criminal conduct by the President outweighs any reputational risk that the President might suffer from the disclosure of his role.

More broadly, we should not lose sight of how the balance of equities will shift in different cases. Recall that even a sitting President may be named in a bill of particulars before trial and as a coconspirator or as part of other criminal activity at trial. In other words, the marginal benefit to the prosecution, to the defense, or the publics right to know in such cases can override a sitting Presidents interest in not being publicly namedeven including cases in which there is already overwhelming evidence to find the defendant guilty and the defendant can likely tell the identity of the unnamed person. The point is that our legal system allows tradeoffs at each of these stages, and it is far easier to accept naming a sitting President in an indictment when theres an enormous public interest in knowing.

Objections and some additional complications In addition to the factors we have worked through above, the Presidents lawyers could argue that it is wrong to say he is completely immune from indictment. The Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel accepted in a 2000 opinion that the President at least loses immunity from indictment once he leaves office. So it may be said that one of the conditions that gives rise to the special reason for naming Trump herethat he cant be indictedis weaker. He is not fully immune. He just cant be indicted now. At least thats how this argument would go.

But how much of a salve is it that prosecutors might have an option to indict Trumponly after his presidency is over? If a president could be prosecuted only after leaving office (including the prospect of two four-year terms), that could significantly erode the prospect of an effective trial. In Clinton v. Jones, the Supreme Court held that a civil lawsuit against a sitting President could proceed while he was in office. The Court recognized the significant impairment that can result from delaying a civil case against a president until after his term of office. Justice Stevens wrote for the Court: Such a lengthy and categorical stay takes no account whatever of the respondents interest in bringing the case to trial. delaying trial would increase the danger of prejudice resulting from the loss of evidence, including the inability of witnesses to recall specific facts, or the possible death of a party. These concerns are amplified in criminal trials where the burden is on a prosecutor to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

That said, perhaps Muellers hands are tied in that regard. The Office of Legal Counsel opinion in 2000 also counsels against an indictment of a sitting President that is then held in abeyance. So why wouldnt the reasons for that conclusion dictate the same outcome (temporary immunity) for the question of naming a President as an unindicted coconspirator? The Office of Legal Counsel opinion neither addresses nor excludes the option of naming a sitting president in a bill of particulars or at trial. And the scenarios for doing so far exceed cases of coconspirators or hearsay rules. For example, imagine a bribery case against a sitting President that would implicate her when prosecuting the person making the bribe. The OLC opinion does not foreclose implicating the sitting President in that criminality.

Whats more (and its a lot more) is Muellers solemn responsibility described earlier. It cant be that Mueller has the authority and publicly understood duty to investigate Trump for potential crimes, but not the power to say whether Trump was involved in any offences. Its also worth looking back at the Watergate special prosecutors team,team which wrote a memo to say:

If we conclude that indictment of the President is constitutionally barred or is inappropriate, then we and the Grand Jury can and must fulfill our responsibilities to the public and to the law by recommending a Grand Jury presentment setting out in detail the most important evidence and the Grand Jurys conclusions that the President has violated certain criminal statutes and would have been indicted were he not President. There appears to be no question of the propriety or legality of such a course.

Finally, recall the federal courts explanation that diplomatic immunity is one of the instances where prosecutors would have reason to name the person as an unindicted coconspirator in an indictment. Like the OLC opinion on the President, diplomatic immunity can be temporary too. The Justice Department saw fit to name a foreign diplomat as an unindicted coconspirator in a grand jury indictment within three years after Briggs.

Having mined through the arguments on different sides of this issue, it seems clear that Mueller would have an open path to name President Trump in an indictmentfor example as an unindicted coconspiratorif theres sufficient evidence of the Presidents involvement in criminal activity within the jurisdiction of the Special Counsel. The Watergate special prosecutors legal team appeared to think there was not just an availability but a profound responsibility to name President Nixon as an unindicted coconspirator if thats where the evidence led them, and that may rightfully be Muellers lodestar.

[Final note: for a perspective that differs from mine, read Professor James Jacobs Just Securityarticle, Naming the President as an Unindicted Co-conspirator?]

Amid reports that the first arrests in Robert Muellers investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election were imminent, Donald Trumps most bullish defender strove on Sunday to cast doubt on the reach and integrity of the special counsel. As he did so, the president himself sought to focus attention on supposed scandals involving Hillary Clinton.

The Showboats, The CyberWars, and The Russian Trolls, Real and Virtual: Why didn’t the FBI see all of this?! | The Profile Of Mass Shooter and The Neuro-Psychological (“Psychotronic”) Manipulation Of Voting Behaviors Online

Congress in touch with Cambridge Analytica who helped Trump winETtech.com
Congress in touch with Cambridge Analytica who helped Trump win Has the Congress found the Brahmastra for the next general elections? Perhaps it has, if one goes by reports that Congress is in touch with Big Data firm Cambridge Analyticathat helped US …

The future of propaganda is on the line in election probeNewsday
A spotlight shines anew on Cambridge Analytica, the company part-owned by the billionaire Mercers of Long Island that has been deeply involved in analyzing and mining people’s data to influence election campaigns. Last week the company acknowledged …

President Trump has a ready weapon in hand to return fire when he feels under attack. When somebody says something about me, I am able to go bing, bing, bing and I take care of it, the president said. Trump, of course, was talking about Twitter, which has become a staple of his presidency. In […]

The Iran Business Ties Trump Didn’t DiscloseThe New Yorker
Azarpassillo has another interesting connection; one of its apparent partners in money laundering, the Mammadov family of Azerbaijan, was also, until quite recently, in business with the Trump Organization. In fact, for the entire Presidential campaign…and more »

Trump claims false laurelsDaily TimesTrump has put his immaturity on display once again with this statement. Those familiar with the history of the ongoing conflicts in Syria are … I hope that this dishonest political strategy will not work. A re-election of DonaldTrump in the next …and more »

Now we can make a conclusion that the Cyber Weapons: the mass, including the pre-electoral ones, and the individual, including anti-dissenting ones, are developed and used by the Russians. These thesis and hypothesis are of the enormous significance. The FBI would commit the criminally negligent blunder if it does not look into this, now and in-depth, and if it does not take the comprehensive defensive measures and the counter-measures.

It also has the important implications for the Mueller’s Inquiry: Did the Cambridge Analytica use any of the algorithms developed by the Russians in Trump’s campaign work? Did they communicate with each other in the process of the campaign, besides the recently surfaced reports on the interactions between Alexander Nix, a head of the Cambridge Analytica, and Assange? Were they paid by the Russians? Is the money paid to them (about $6ml, reportedly) of the Russian origin?

The issue of the effect and the impact, just like in Brexit, remain unaddressed. and they are difficult to approach and to study, but they absolutely should be.

One of the overarching and pertinent questions:

Is the Cambridge Analytica actually a Russian front and a hidden (although in plain sight), new, mass, and possibly individual, custom-designed Cyber-Weapon?! What are the other companies of this type, and what do they do?

Michael Novakhov

10.29.17

_______________________________

Dmytro Shymkiv, deputy head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine on Administrative, Social and Economic Reform, explained this month during the Future in Review conference in Park City, Utah.

According to Ukrainian security officials, Russian agents build a psychological profile of their mark through his or her social media footprint. Then, using that information, the Russians can make personalized computer viruses, or run a social media influence operation specifically crafted with that one particular person in mind.

Shortly after The Daily Beastreported Nix’s contact with Assange Wednesday, the Trump campaign’s executive director sought to downplay Cambridge’s role. Michael Glassner said in a statement that the Republican National Committee was the campaign’s primary source of voter data. “Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false,” Michael Glassner wrote. The statement did not respond to reportingin WIRED and elsewhere revealing a close relationship between the Trump campaign and Cambridge staffers. Cambridge did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

So, what gives? Such he-said-she-said battles are usually better left to Beltway happy hours. But as Congress and special investigator Robert Mueller turn their spotlights on Cambridge Analytica in their probes into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, it’s essential to get the facts straight about what the firm did—and didn’t—do for the Trump campaign.

Here’s what we know.

Cambridge worked both for the Trump campaign and a Trump-aligned Super PAC. In June 2016, Cambridge sent three staffers, led by chief product officer Matt Oczkowski, to the campaign’s San Antonio office. Oczkowski’s team eventually grew to 13 people, working under Trump digital director Brad Parscale and alongside his staff and outside consultants. According to Parscale, the Cambridge staff provided useful analysis of data about the American electorate. They did not, however, provide the raw data—things like demographic information, contact information, and data about how voters feel about different issues—on which that analysis was done.

That may sound like a small distinction, but it’s a crucial one. Ever since it burst onto the scene of American politics in 2015, Cambridge has trumpeted its massive data trove, boasting 5,000 data points on every American. Cambridge claims to have built extensive personality profiles on every American, which it uses for so-called “psychographic targeting,” based on people’s personality types. It is feared by some, including Hillary Clinton, for conducting a kind of psychological warfare against the American people and dismissed by others as snake oil. Both Parscale and Oczkowski have said repeatedly that the Trump campaign did not use psychographic targeting. Questions also have swirled about how Cambridge accumulated the data. Liberal voters in particular worried that their data had been harvested without their knowledge and used to elect Trump. But according to both Parscale and Oczkowski, the campaign didn’t use Cambridge’s trove of data, opting instead for the RNC’s data file.

“The RNC was the voter file of record for the campaign, but we were the intelligence on top of the voter file,” Oczkowski says. “Sometimes the sales pitch can be a bit inflated, and I think people can misconstrue that.”

Parscale describes the firm’s work this way: “As I’ve said multiple times over prior statements, Matt Oczkowski and his team created a daily tracker of polling, so that I could see how Trump was doing in key swing states. They provided that to me daily.” Parscale says Cambridge also helped the campaign with what he calls “persuasion online media buying. They also helped us identify potential donors. And they created a visualization tool that showed in each state which areas were most persuadable and what those voters care about.”

Cambridge Analytica was paid $5.9 million by the Trump campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings, $5 million of which went toward buying television ads, with the remainder going to pay Oczkowski and his team. But that wasn’t the only work Cambridge did for the campaign. Parscale says Cambridge’s head of digital, Molly Schweikert, managed an advertising budget of roughly $12 million on behalf of Parscale’s firm, Giles-Parscale. It’s a sizable, but still small slice of the $94 million Giles-Parscale was paid in total to purchase the campaign’s ads.

The Cambridge staff helped the campaign identify which voters in the RNC’s data file were most likely to be persuadable, meaning they were undecided but looked likely to swing toward Trump. They also created lists of voters who were most likely to become donors. In August 2016, a Trump aide told meCambridge was critical to helping the campaign raise $80 million in the prior month, after a primary race that had been largely self-funded by Trump. This was the only period during which Oczkowski’s staff relied on Cambridge’s data, because the RNC was just beginning to share its data with the Trump team.

Cambridge went on to conduct hundreds of thousands of voter surveys for the Trump campaign to better understand the likely Trump voter and sent a full-time staffer to the New York headquarters, who could relay these findings to senior staff, including Parscale. Based on these surveys, RNC data, data the Trump team collected itself, and commercially available information from data brokers, Oczkowski’s team developed a heat map of the country to pinpoint where Trump should visit to maximize his impact on potentially persuadable voters.

Oczkowski views this as a collaborative effort between his team, the RNC, the campaign, and other vendors, including Deep Root Analytics, which helped the campaign target television ads. “At the end of the day, when candidates win elections, it’s a big team effort,” he says.

The RNC played a very important role in that team. Gary Coby, director of advertising at the RNC, managed the bulk of the campaign’s advertising purchases on Facebook. The campaign famously ran 175,000 variations of the same ad on Facebook the day of the third presidential debate in October 2016, a tactic Coby refers to as “A/B testing on steroids.” The RNC also ran the campaign’s field operations and worked with Parscale to plan get-out-the-vote advertising campaigns on television and online.

What’s also clear, however, is that the Trump campaign seems to have ample motivation to distance itself from Cambridge, a firm whose tactics have sometimes raised questions. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that shadowy billionaire and Trump supporter Robert Mercer is Cambridge’s main financial backer. Former Trump campaign manager and chief strategist to President Trump, Steve Bannon, also held a position on Cambridge’s board. The company itself is an offshoot of the British firm, SCL, which has roots in government and military operations.

Now, Assange’s confirmation that Cambridge’s CEO wanted to join forces against Clinton has renewed suspicions about the company’s business tactics, suspicions that the Trump team would very much like to avoid in the face of ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the election.

“I had absolutely no understanding any of this was going on, and I was surprised as everybody else when I saw the story” about Nix’s approach to Assange, Oczkowski says. During the campaign, he says his team was walled off from the rest of Cambridge, because the company was also working with a Trump Super PAC. Federal regulations prevent campaigns from coordinating with Super PACs.

Of the 13 Cambridge staffers who worked in Trump’s San Antonio office, only four remain at the company.

Still, for some in Congress, the web of connections among Nix, the campaign, and now, Assange, seems too close for comfort. The House Intelligence Committee has acquired Cambridge staffers’ email records, which it is currently analyzing for clues of inappropriate contact with foreign actors trying to meddle in the election. Next week, representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google will testify before both the House and Senate intelligence committees and will likely face questions about their interactions with Trump’s digital team and members of Cambridge’s staff.

And investigators will, no doubt, continue to question members of team Trump about Nix’s communication with Assange. The panels will be seeking answers. But, as is often the case when it comes to Cambridge, each answer will likely only lead to more questions.

Russians Reportedly Used Anti-Virus Software to Steal U.S. Cyber–Weapons … Officials were “concerned about the ties between certain Kaspersky officials and Russian intelligence and other government agencies,” the …

Kiev, Ukraine—Since 2014, Russia has used Ukraine as a testing ground for its hybrid warfare doctrine, underscoring what some security experts say is a case study for the new kinds of security threats the U.S. and its Western allies can anticipate from Moscow.

“The threats Ukraine faces are harbingers of things to come for the U.S. and its other allies,” said Junaid Islam, chief technology officer and president of Vidder, a California-based cybersecurity firm that does work in Ukraine.

“It is in the national strategic interests of both the United States and Ukraine to cooperate deeply in cybersecurity, because Ukraine is a canary in the cyberspace coal mine,” Islam told The Daily Signal.

A top Ukrainian security official recently disclosed a cyberwarfare tactic honed by Russia in Ukraine, which could be a bellwether for Russia’s next act of political warfare against the U.S.

The Ukrainian government recently has been attacked by “undetectable” computer viruses that target “particular individuals, in particular departments, and they’re constructed based on the social understanding of social media by particular people,” Dmytro Shymkiv, deputy head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine on Administrative, Social and Economic Reform, explained this month during the Future in Review conference in Park City, Utah.

According to Ukrainian security officials, Russian agents build a psychological profile of their mark through his or her social media footprint. Then, using that information, the Russians can make personalized computer viruses, or run a social media influence operation specifically crafted with that one particular person in mind.

“People say, ‘Well, that’s a science fiction.’ It’s not,” Shymkiv said. “When the annexation of Crimea took place, [Russia] shut down the internet to Ukraine, and they used social media to influence people’s behavior. And you can influence people’s behavior. You do it in a nice way, posting things to their friends, et cetera. There’s a whole factory in Russia doing this.”

Vladimir Putin in Sochi on October 19, 2017. ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AFP/Getty

This is known in the cybersecurity world as “social engineering”—a form of cyberattack in which people are psychologically manipulated into performing actions or divulging confidential information. According to some security experts, the best defense against this kind of threat is education.

“Man is the weakest link in the chain of information technology,” Mykhailo Vasyanovich, head of the Public Council for the Ministry of Information Policy of Ukraine, told The Daily Signal.

“With such cyberattacks, which are now taking place in Ukraine, it is necessary to raise the level of information technology literacy of users by conducting educational work on cybersecurity among employees of private and state enterprises,” Vasyanovich said.

Some experts worry this reliance on the security savvy of internet users to fend off Russian cyberattacks might be a vulnerability for the U.S.

“What may especially worry the U.S. is that Russia targets influential individuals, such as journalists or political analysts, especially those of rather skeptical approach toward Moscow,” Daniel Szeligowski, senior research fellow on Ukraine for the Polish Institute of International Affairs, told The Daily Signal.

“Unlike institutions or infrastructure, they don’t have state protection and are thus vulnerable to intimidation and blackmailing,” Szeligowski added. “And given the rising popularity of social media, such a threat is even more widespread.”

Hybrid War

Russia’s hybrid attacks against Ukraine have included, but are not limited to:

Using social media to shape public opinion among an adversary’s population.

Turning commercially available computer software into a tool for espionage and cyberwarfare.

Exploiting smartphones to spy on and wage psychological warfare against an adversary’s military forces.

Using cyberattacks to undermine an adversary’s electoral process.

Using pseudo-news reports to push a propaganda line that sows division within an adversary’s national culture.

All of these tactics have also been used by Russia against the U.S. since Russo-American relations took a nosedive in the fallout over Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine in early 2014.

“Ukraine is a perfect testing ground for hybrid warfare,” Szeligowski said. “Thus, it is no wonder that Russia has already seized the opportunity, and in Ukraine it has made a dry run of all sorts of its offensive techniques.”

Russian hybrid warfare is not covert warfare. Rather, it’s the combined use of conventional military force with other means such as cyberattacks and propaganda to sow chaos and confusion—both on the battlefield and deep behind the front lines.

Hybrid warfare is an evolving threat spanning every combat domain. Particularly, hybrid warfare weaponizes many pieces of everyday life, including smartphones, social media networks, commercially available computer software, and journalism.

“Russia is testing in Ukraine both procedures and concepts, which later on are being applied in the West—such as during the U.S. and French elections,” a Polish security official told The Daily Signal on background, asking not to be named due to professional restrictions on speaking to the media.

“In short, Ukraine remains for Russia a crucial hybrid warfare battleground and testbed,” the security official said. “The Russian hybrid warfare model is being further developed, perfected, and tested as we speak. Russia’s ability to escalate rapidly across the whole spectrum of conflict makes the West prone to the ‘surprise effect.’”

Russia’s use of social media and cyberattacks as weapons of war might be innovative, but, at its core, it’s a modern revamp of a Cold War-era idea.

Hybrid warfare is the Kremlin’s contemporary take on a Soviet military doctrine called “deep battle,” in which front-line combat operations are supported with operations to spread chaos and confusion deep within the enemy’s country. Hybrid warfare also draws on the Soviet Union’s well-documented history of “influence operations” against the U.S. and other Western allies.

In effect, Russia’s overall strategy to undermine the West hasn’t changed all that much from the Soviet Union’s playbook. But the world in which those Soviet theories are now put into practice is a radically different one than during the Cold War.

The advent of the internet, and social media in particular, has given the Kremlin direct access to the populations of its adversaries—bypassing the gatekeeper role America’s media institutions used to play.

“Everything today is digitized, including phone and mail services, and everything runs on the same network,” Kenneth Geers, ambassador of NATO’s cybersecurity center and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told The Daily Signal. “There is only one internet, and one cyberspace, inhabited by all of the world’s citizens, soldiers, spies, and statesmen.”

Meanwhile, Americans’ distrust in their media institutions has reached historic levels. Russia has stealthily taken advantage of Americans’ crisis of confidence in the media to permeate the U.S. news cycle with misinformation spread by propaganda mouthpieces cloaked as alternative news sources, such as RT and Sputnik.

Lessons Learned

Some commercial cybersecurity firms have stepped in both to harden Ukraine’s cyberdefenses and use lessons learned from Ukraine to craft better defenses for the U.S. to counter Russia.

“With the world increasingly digital and connected, Ukraine is of strategic, vital interest to the West,” said Greg Ness, a cybersecurity specialist and vice president of marketing at Vidder. “What happens in Ukraine doesn’t stay in Ukraine.”

California-based Vidder has put together a team of cybersecurity experts to comprise the core of a proposed U.S.-Ukraine cybersecurity center with offices in Kiev, Washington, and Silicon Valley.

“By ensuring that Ukraine adopts leading cybersecurity solutions and best practices, we will not only provide Ukraine with the best protection from cyberattacks, but it also helps U.S. experts develop new and more effective technologies and strategies in the future,” Islam, Vidder’s president, told The Daily Signal. “It will also help establish Ukraine as a secure, stable, prosperous, and reliable ally in Eastern Europe.”

The war in Ukraine has shaped how NATO forces are training for the next military conflict. On Thursday, NATO and Ukraine launched a joint center to counter hybrid warfare. The center is part of the Comprehensive Assistance Package that NATO pledged to Ukraine during the alliance’s summit in Warsaw last year.

According to NATO, the joint center will be “a platform for identifying lessons learned from hybrid war in Ukraine.”

For its part, the U.S. military has reportedly been studying the war in Ukraine to shape its own military doctrine.

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the Trump administration’s national security adviser, recently directed a study to analyze Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics in Ukraine in order to craft recommendations for the U.S. Army.

Szeligowski added, however, that not all of Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics in Ukraine would be effective against the U.S.

“There is a yawning gap between Ukrainian and American cyber capabilities, not to mention cultural and linguistic differences between Russians and Americans,” Szeligowski said. “But it goes beyond any doubt that, at least at some point, Russia already used hybrid warfare instruments against the U.S.—and did it effectively.”

Hybrid Way of Life

The effects of Russia’s proxy war against Ukraine are limited to a 250-mile-long static front line in southeastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. The war is moderated in intensity and is geographically frozen according to the rules of the February 2015 cease-fire deal, known as Minsk II.

More than 10,100 Ukrainians have died so far in the war. The conflict has displaced about 1.7 million people. Yet, the physical consequences of the war are quarantined from most of the country. Outside the range of the artillery, mortars, rockets, and tank shots, you’d hardly know there was war going on.

On a physical battlefield, a war extends as far as the range of the weapons used. In hybrid warfare, however, the battlefield knows no limit.

Consequently, there’s hardly any part of Ukrainian life that hasn’t been affected by Russia’s ongoing hybrid war.

Russian cyberattacks have hit Ukraine’s power grid, water supply systems, the country’s banking system (shutting down ATMs), its largest international airport, and the electoral process.

In December 2016, a cyberattack, which Ukrainian officials attributed to Russia, took down one-fifth of Kiev’s electrical grid. Since 2014, Ukrainian security services have thwarted numerous cyberattacks in which malware from abroad was used in attempts to steal classified information from Ukrainian government networks.

In the eyes of Ukrainian security officials, the internet has become as much of a battlefield as the trenches in the Donbas region. The main goal of Russia’s information warfare, according to Ukrainian security officials, is to incite civil unrest throughout all of Ukraine and to undermine the government’s credibility.

Since 2014, Ukraine has established a Situation Center for Cybersecurity, and Ukrainian officials have fostered closer ties to Western intelligence agencies to bolster their cyberdefenses.

Security State

Russia’s purchase of $100,000 worth of Facebook advertisements in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election sparked a media frenzy in America and an outcry from lawmakers for social media sites to provide better transparency about the identity of those who purchase advertisements on their sites.

In Ukraine, Russia has been exploiting social media as a weapon of war for years.

In a sweeping ban announced in May, Ukrainian officials banned Russian internet search engines, including Yandex, as well as popular Russian social media sites such as VKontakte, which millions of Ukrainians used.

The ban prompted some pushback from Ukrainians, who used these sites for many daily tasks and for social reasons. But Ukrainian officials insisted the sites posed a national security threat, which warranted the free speech trade-off.

Also in May, Ukraine banned commercially available Russian software, including anti-virus software from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab—the same company U.S. officials now say was used as a Trojan horse for Russian intelligence agencies to steal classified information from the U.S. government.

“The risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky, could capitalize on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates U.S. national security,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a Sept. 13 statement posted to its website.

U.S. intelligence officials said Russian intelligence services had modified anti-virus software from Kaspersky Lab to clandestinely search computers around the world for classified U.S. government documents and top-secret information.

“Possessing a worldwide deployment of sensors may be too great a temptation for any country’s intelligence service to ignore, and Kaspersky may have been forced into a quiet business partnership with the Russian government,” Geers, the NATO cybersecurity specialist, said.

Similarly, news reports recently detailed how Russian military forces have been targeting the smartphones of NATO troops to gather intelligence.

Ukrainian soldiers in the eastern war zone have long been advised by their leaders not to turn on their smartphones while in the war zone. Russian forces reportedly have used the cell signals emitting from Ukrainian soldiers’ phones to target its artillery.

And for years Ukrainian soldiers have reported receiving death threats and demands for their surrender from their enemies over cellphone text messages.

New Weapons

Journalism has been one of Russia’s most lethal weapons against Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials have banned a slew of Russian TV stations from broadcasting in Ukraine, and foreign journalists accused of spreading Russian propaganda have been booted out of the country.

Anti-propaganda outlets in Ukraine such as <a href=”http://StopFake.org” rel=”nofollow”>StopFake.org</a> also monitor media reports for Russian disinformation and are dedicated to setting the record straight.

To counter Russian propaganda in the war zone, Ukraine’s government has rebuilt its TV and radio broadcast network in the east—which Russia and its separatist proxies destroyed in the opening days of the war.

For years, Ukrainian citizens in eastern Ukraine could access only Russian TV channels for their news. Now, Ukraine has taken back control of the airwaves. While not as evident or as spectacular as the artillery bombardments and the tank battles, the battle for broadcast dominance in eastern Ukraine is a key piece of the overall war effort for Kiev.

After all, many Ukrainian citizens in eastern Ukraine can’t tell whether the artillery they are living under is fired from Ukrainian or Russian forces. And so long as they had access only to Russian television networks—which exclusively painted Ukrainian forces as the aggressor and, consequently, responsible for all civilian casualties—public opinion toward Ukraine’s central government was under an endless stress test as the war dragged on.

Now, with Ukraine able to defend itself on the airwaves, Russia has lost a potent weapon to turn the citizens of eastern Ukraine against their own government.

Similarly, U.S. lawmakers have debated how to defend the U.S. population against Kremlin-backed news outlets, including RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik, which U.S. officials have called out as Russian propaganda mouthpieces.

The FBI reportedly has turned to a U.S. law intended to prevent the spread of Nazi propaganda to determine whether the two Russian media outlets should register as foreign agents.

In America, as has been the case in Ukraine, manipulation of the media by a foreign power increasingly is regarded as a hostile act warranting retaliation.

“America has experienced a sustained attempt by a hostile power to feed and exploit our country’s division,” former President George W. Bush said in an Oct. 19 speech in New York.

Russia “has made a project of turning Americans against each other,” Bush said, adding, “Foreign aggressions, including cyberattacks, disinformation, and financial influence, should never be downplayed or tolerated.”

Nolan Peterson, a former special operations pilot and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is The Daily Signal’s foreign correspondent based in Ukraine.

Putin Starts Aiming His Cyberweapons Against IndividualsNewsweek
According to Ukrainian security officials, Russian agents build a psychological profile of their mark through his or her social media footprint. Then, using that information, the Russians can make personalized computer viruses, or run a social media …

A surprising find he made when searching the data of the world for answers was for India.

This was a search he was proud of finding – the number one search in India is “my husband wants me to breastfeed him.”

Indian newspapers followed up his finding and interviewed people about the search.

All those interviewed said it was untrue and that Mr Stephens-Davidowitz was crazy.

The data he analyses, he said, can be used to potentially predict certain events.

Google searches for the likes of “kill Muslims” can be cross-related to where hate crimes are committed.

When former US president Barack Obama tried to cool religious tensions after the San Bernardino shootings in which Muslims were the killers, searches for “kill Muslims” went up.

When Obama told people about what Muslims had done for the country and their successes, the searches dropped and curiosity took place.

For weeks after his speech the top searches were for Muslim athletes and other Muslim accomplishments.

The search data could be used to predict health problems, too.

Those at a high risk for pancreatic cancer searched for both chest pain and heart burn.

The searches separately were not a good enough indicator.

WLTH presents What Google can tell us about who we really are: A window into the human psyche with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, in partnership with the Brisbane Times, as part of James Street’s RESORT series.

The biggest predictor of Trump’s election was racist Google searchesThe Sydney Morning Herald
Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral win was more accurately predicted by racist searches on Google than any other data set. On a map, the US states with the highest searches for racist things such as jokes compared with a map of Trump’s biggest wins were …

“The technologies can capture what people are thinking at a particular moment,” Albright told me, “and serve it back to them over and over again.” And with the benefit of psychographic profiling, he adds, they’re able to deliver “content on an individual basis on Twitter and Facebook feeds where people are being grabbed and pulled in certain directions through certain types of posts and stories.

T he British are now looking into whether President Vladimir Putin’s Russia intervened in the United Kingdom’s June 2016 referendum on continued membership in the European Union. The “Brexit” won by about 52 percent, but it’s unclear whether Russian interference in the affair, through social media buys or other means, made a difference. Many people in Britain long have had reservations about integration and complaints about the EU, so the outcome did not come as a shot from the dark.

At the same time, Russia was in favor of Britain’s leaving the EU as a means of putting the cat among the pigeons for EU members, which include once-satellites of the former Soviet Union.

Russia has also interfered in recent elections in France, Germany and the United States. It has showed itself capable of weighing in both through media and through technological capacities in the field of communications, hacking into inner-party communications and, less clearly, voting mechanisms. This is troubling to the affected nations, but it must be kept in mind that governments the world over, including various U.S. administrations, have often tried to meddle in others’ internal affairs.

In the United States there are still underway investigations into the role of Russia in the 2016 elections. The most vigorous of these is led by special counsel and former FBI head Robert S. Mueller 3rd, but there are less reliable, more politicized inquiries being carried out by the Senate and House of Representatives Intelligence committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee. These risk being slow-rolled in spite of their importance due to possible links they are exploring between Trump campaign personnel and Russians.

Negotiations between British and EU representatives over Brexit, which still has the support of the British public, are giving the U.K.’s political leadership, including Prime Minister Theresa May, fits. One painful issue is how much the British will have to pay the EU, based on commitments it undertook during its membership, to get out. Another is the new situation in terms of rights of British citizens in remaining EU members and other EU member countries’ citizens in Britain.

Another knotty question is what the new, post-Brexit situation will be at the border between Ireland, which will remain an EU member, and Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom but a part whose population voted against Brexit. That border is now wide open. Its changed status, to the border between an EU member and a nonmember U.K., risks blowing up the famous 1998 Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland.

Another major problem in the evolving EU-British negotiations is that, given the shaky political situation inside and among the British political parties since the Conservatives lost May’s hastily called elections in June, EU countries and negotiators are not certain that the British government can deliver home approval on any agreement reached with them.

If nothing else, Putin has to be wringing his hands with glee at both the intra-British quarreling over Brexit and the tension occasioned by the negotiations over Brexit between the British and the rest of the Europeans — just as he must be smiling at the energy Americans continue to expend battling each other over Donald Trump’s election.

All of this plays into Russia’s hands and points up for Americans the necessity to get to the bottom of the mischief that Russia has been able so far to wreak in American politics, and the need to block it off before Americans go to the polls again.

A possible Russian role should in Brexit vote be checked outThe Keene Sentinel
T he British are now looking into whether President Vladimir Putin’s Russia intervened in the United Kingdom’s June 2016 referendum on continued membership in the European Union. The “Brexit” won by about 52 percent, but it’s unclear whether Russian …

Now we can make a conclusion that the Cyber Weapons: the mass, including the pre-electoral ones, and the individual, including anti-dissenting ones, are developed and used by the Russians. These thesis and hypothesis are of the enormous significance. The FBI would commit the criminally negligent blunder if it does not look into this, now and in-depth, and if it does not take the comprehensive defensive measures and the counter-measures.

It also has the important implications for the Mueller’s Inquiry: Did the Cambridge Analytica use any of the algorithms developed by the Russians in Trump’s campaign work? Did they communicate with each other in the process of the campaign, besides the recently surfaced reports on the interactions between Alexander Nix, a head of the Cambridge Analytica, and Assange? Were they paid by the Russians? Is the money paid to them (about $6ml, reportedly) of the Russian origin?

The issue of the effect and the impact, just like in Brexit, remain unaddressed. and they are difficult to approach and to study, but they absolutely should be.

One of the overarching and pertinent questions:

Is the Cambridge Analytica actually a Russian front and a hidden (although in plain sight), new, mass, and possibly individual, custom-designed Cyber-Weapon?! What are the other companies of this type, and what do they do?

Michael Novakhov

10.29.17

_______________________________

Dmytro Shymkiv, deputy head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine on Administrative, Social and Economic Reform, explained this month during the Future in Review conference in Park City, Utah.

According to Ukrainian security officials, Russian agents build a psychological profile of their mark through his or her social media footprint. Then, using that information, the Russians can make personalized computer viruses, or run a social media influence operation specifically crafted with that one particular person in mind.

“People say, ‘Well, that’s a science fiction.’ It’s not,” Shymkiv said. “When the annexation of Crimea took place, [Russia] shut down the internet to Ukraine, and they used social media to influence people’s behavior. And you can influence people’s behavior. You do it in a nice way, posting things to their friends, et cetera. There’s a whole factory in Russia doing this.”

“What may especially worry the U.S. is that

Russia targets influential individuals, such as journalists or political analysts, especially those of rather skeptical approach toward Moscow,”

Daniel Szeligowski, senior research fellow on Ukraine for the Polish Institute of International Affairs, told The Daily Signal.

“Unlike institutions or infrastructure, they don’t have state protection and are thus vulnerable to intimidation and blackmailing,” Szeligowski added. “And given the rising popularity of social media, such a threat is even more widespread.”

Kiev, Ukraine—Since 2014, Russia has used Ukraine as a testing ground for its hybrid warfare doctrine, underscoring what some security experts say is a case study for the new kinds of security threats the U.S. and its Western allies can anticipate from Moscow.

“The threats Ukraine faces are harbingers of things to come for the U.S. and its other allies,” said Junaid Islam, chief technology officer and president of Vidder, a California-based cybersecurity firm that does work in Ukraine.

“It is in the national strategic interests of both the United States and Ukraine to cooperate deeply in cybersecurity, because Ukraine is a canary in the cyberspace coal mine,” Islam told The Daily Signal.

A top Ukrainian security official recently disclosed a cyberwarfare tactic honed by Russia in Ukraine, which could be a bellwether for Russia’s next act of political warfare against the U.S.

The Ukrainian government recently has been attacked by “undetectable” computer viruses that target “particular individuals, in particular departments, and they’re constructed based on the social understanding of social media by particular people,” Dmytro Shymkiv, deputy head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine on Administrative, Social and Economic Reform, explained this month during the Future in Review conference in Park City, Utah.

According to Ukrainian security officials, Russian agents build a psychological profile of their mark through his or her social media footprint. Then, using that information, the Russians can make personalized computer viruses, or run a social media influence operation specifically crafted with that one particular person in mind.

“People say, ‘Well, that’s a science fiction.’ It’s not,” Shymkiv said. “When the annexation of Crimea took place, [Russia] shut down the internet to Ukraine, and they used social media to influence people’s behavior. And you can influence people’s behavior. You do it in a nice way, posting things to their friends, et cetera. There’s a whole factory in Russia doing this.”

Vladimir Putin in Sochi on October 19, 2017. ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AFP/Getty

This is known in the cybersecurity world as “social engineering”—a form of cyberattack in which people are psychologically manipulated into performing actions or divulging confidential information. According to some security experts, the best defense against this kind of threat is education.

“Man is the weakest link in the chain of information technology,” Mykhailo Vasyanovich, head of the Public Council for the Ministry of Information Policy of Ukraine, told The Daily Signal.

“With such cyberattacks, which are now taking place in Ukraine, it is necessary to raise the level of information technology literacy of users by conducting educational work on cybersecurity among employees of private and state enterprises,” Vasyanovich said.

Some experts worry this reliance on the security savvy of internet users to fend off Russian cyberattacks might be a vulnerability for the U.S.

“What may especially worry the U.S. is that Russia targets influential individuals, such as journalists or political analysts, especially those of rather skeptical approach toward Moscow,” Daniel Szeligowski, senior research fellow on Ukraine for the Polish Institute of International Affairs, told The Daily Signal.

“Unlike institutions or infrastructure, they don’t have state protection and are thus vulnerable to intimidation and blackmailing,” Szeligowski added. “And given the rising popularity of social media, such a threat is even more widespread.”

Hybrid War

Russia’s hybrid attacks against Ukraine have included, but are not limited to:

Using social media to shape public opinion among an adversary’s population.

Turning commercially available computer software into a tool for espionage and cyberwarfare.

Exploiting smartphones to spy on and wage psychological warfare against an adversary’s military forces.

Using cyberattacks to undermine an adversary’s electoral process.

Using pseudo-news reports to push a propaganda line that sows division within an adversary’s national culture.

All of these tactics have also been used by Russia against the U.S. since Russo-American relations took a nosedive in the fallout over Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine in early 2014.

“Ukraine is a perfect testing ground for hybrid warfare,” Szeligowski said. “Thus, it is no wonder that Russia has already seized the opportunity, and in Ukraine it has made a dry run of all sorts of its offensive techniques.”

Russian hybrid warfare is not covert warfare. Rather, it’s the combined use of conventional military force with other means such as cyberattacks and propaganda to sow chaos and confusion—both on the battlefield and deep behind the front lines.

Hybrid warfare is an evolving threat spanning every combat domain. Particularly, hybrid warfare weaponizes many pieces of everyday life, including smartphones, social media networks, commercially available computer software, and journalism.

“Russia is testing in Ukraine both procedures and concepts, which later on are being applied in the West—such as during the U.S. and French elections,” a Polish security official told The Daily Signal on background, asking not to be named due to professional restrictions on speaking to the media.

“In short, Ukraine remains for Russia a crucial hybrid warfare battleground and testbed,” the security official said. “The Russian hybrid warfare model is being further developed, perfected, and tested as we speak. Russia’s ability to escalate rapidly across the whole spectrum of conflict makes the West prone to the ‘surprise effect.’”

Russia’s use of social media and cyberattacks as weapons of war might be innovative, but, at its core, it’s a modern revamp of a Cold War-era idea.

Hybrid warfare is the Kremlin’s contemporary take on a Soviet military doctrine called “deep battle,” in which front-line combat operations are supported with operations to spread chaos and confusion deep within the enemy’s country. Hybrid warfare also draws on the Soviet Union’s well-documented history of “influence operations” against the U.S. and other Western allies.

In effect, Russia’s overall strategy to undermine the West hasn’t changed all that much from the Soviet Union’s playbook. But the world in which those Soviet theories are now put into practice is a radically different one than during the Cold War.

The advent of the internet, and social media in particular, has given the Kremlin direct access to the populations of its adversaries—bypassing the gatekeeper role America’s media institutions used to play.

“Everything today is digitized, including phone and mail services, and everything runs on the same network,” Kenneth Geers, ambassador of NATO’s cybersecurity center and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told The Daily Signal. “There is only one internet, and one cyberspace, inhabited by all of the world’s citizens, soldiers, spies, and statesmen.”

Meanwhile, Americans’ distrust in their media institutions has reached historic levels. Russia has stealthily taken advantage of Americans’ crisis of confidence in the media to permeate the U.S. news cycle with misinformation spread by propaganda mouthpieces cloaked as alternative news sources, such as RT and Sputnik.

Lessons Learned

Some commercial cybersecurity firms have stepped in both to harden Ukraine’s cyberdefenses and use lessons learned from Ukraine to craft better defenses for the U.S. to counter Russia.

“With the world increasingly digital and connected, Ukraine is of strategic, vital interest to the West,” said Greg Ness, a cybersecurity specialist and vice president of marketing at Vidder. “What happens in Ukraine doesn’t stay in Ukraine.”

California-based Vidder has put together a team of cybersecurity experts to comprise the core of a proposed U.S.-Ukraine cybersecurity center with offices in Kiev, Washington, and Silicon Valley.

“By ensuring that Ukraine adopts leading cybersecurity solutions and best practices, we will not only provide Ukraine with the best protection from cyberattacks, but it also helps U.S. experts develop new and more effective technologies and strategies in the future,” Islam, Vidder’s president, told The Daily Signal. “It will also help establish Ukraine as a secure, stable, prosperous, and reliable ally in Eastern Europe.”

The war in Ukraine has shaped how NATO forces are training for the next military conflict. On Thursday, NATO and Ukraine launched a joint center to counter hybrid warfare. The center is part of the Comprehensive Assistance Package that NATO pledged to Ukraine during the alliance’s summit in Warsaw last year.

According to NATO, the joint center will be “a platform for identifying lessons learned from hybrid war in Ukraine.”

For its part, the U.S. military has reportedly been studying the war in Ukraine to shape its own military doctrine.

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the Trump administration’s national security adviser, recently directed a study to analyze Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics in Ukraine in order to craft recommendations for the U.S. Army.

Szeligowski added, however, that not all of Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics in Ukraine would be effective against the U.S.

“There is a yawning gap between Ukrainian and American cyber capabilities, not to mention cultural and linguistic differences between Russians and Americans,” Szeligowski said. “But it goes beyond any doubt that, at least at some point, Russia already used hybrid warfare instruments against the U.S.—and did it effectively.”

Hybrid Way of Life

The effects of Russia’s proxy war against Ukraine are limited to a 250-mile-long static front line in southeastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. The war is moderated in intensity and is geographically frozen according to the rules of the February 2015 cease-fire deal, known as Minsk II.

More than 10,100 Ukrainians have died so far in the war. The conflict has displaced about 1.7 million people. Yet, the physical consequences of the war are quarantined from most of the country. Outside the range of the artillery, mortars, rockets, and tank shots, you’d hardly know there was war going on.

On a physical battlefield, a war extends as far as the range of the weapons used. In hybrid warfare, however, the battlefield knows no limit.

Consequently, there’s hardly any part of Ukrainian life that hasn’t been affected by Russia’s ongoing hybrid war.

Russian cyberattacks have hit Ukraine’s power grid, water supply systems, the country’s banking system (shutting down ATMs), its largest international airport, and the electoral process.

In December 2016, a cyberattack, which Ukrainian officials attributed to Russia, took down one-fifth of Kiev’s electrical grid. Since 2014, Ukrainian security services have thwarted numerous cyberattacks in which malware from abroad was used in attempts to steal classified information from Ukrainian government networks.

In the eyes of Ukrainian security officials, the internet has become as much of a battlefield as the trenches in the Donbas region. The main goal of Russia’s information warfare, according to Ukrainian security officials, is to incite civil unrest throughout all of Ukraine and to undermine the government’s credibility.

Since 2014, Ukraine has established a Situation Center for Cybersecurity, and Ukrainian officials have fostered closer ties to Western intelligence agencies to bolster their cyberdefenses.

Security State

Russia’s purchase of $100,000 worth of Facebook advertisements in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election sparked a media frenzy in America and an outcry from lawmakers for social media sites to provide better transparency about the identity of those who purchase advertisements on their sites.

In Ukraine, Russia has been exploiting social media as a weapon of war for years.

In a sweeping ban announced in May, Ukrainian officials banned Russian internet search engines, including Yandex, as well as popular Russian social media sites such as VKontakte, which millions of Ukrainians used.

The ban prompted some pushback from Ukrainians, who used these sites for many daily tasks and for social reasons. But Ukrainian officials insisted the sites posed a national security threat, which warranted the free speech trade-off.

Also in May, Ukraine banned commercially available Russian software, including anti-virus software from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab—the same company U.S. officials now say was used as a Trojan horse for Russian intelligence agencies to steal classified information from the U.S. government.

“The risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky, could capitalize on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates U.S. national security,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a Sept. 13 statement posted to its website.

U.S. intelligence officials said Russian intelligence services had modified anti-virus software from Kaspersky Lab to clandestinely search computers around the world for classified U.S. government documents and top-secret information.

“Possessing a worldwide deployment of sensors may be too great a temptation for any country’s intelligence service to ignore, and Kaspersky may have been forced into a quiet business partnership with the Russian government,” Geers, the NATO cybersecurity specialist, said.

Similarly, news reports recently detailed how Russian military forces have been targeting the smartphones of NATO troops to gather intelligence.

Ukrainian soldiers in the eastern war zone have long been advised by their leaders not to turn on their smartphones while in the war zone. Russian forces reportedly have used the cell signals emitting from Ukrainian soldiers’ phones to target its artillery.

And for years Ukrainian soldiers have reported receiving death threats and demands for their surrender from their enemies over cellphone text messages.

New Weapons

Journalism has been one of Russia’s most lethal weapons against Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials have banned a slew of Russian TV stations from broadcasting in Ukraine, and foreign journalists accused of spreading Russian propaganda have been booted out of the country.

Anti-propaganda outlets in Ukraine such as <a href=”http://StopFake.org” rel=”nofollow”>StopFake.org</a> also monitor media reports for Russian disinformation and are dedicated to setting the record straight.

To counter Russian propaganda in the war zone, Ukraine’s government has rebuilt its TV and radio broadcast network in the east—which Russia and its separatist proxies destroyed in the opening days of the war.

For years, Ukrainian citizens in eastern Ukraine could access only Russian TV channels for their news. Now, Ukraine has taken back control of the airwaves. While not as evident or as spectacular as the artillery bombardments and the tank battles, the battle for broadcast dominance in eastern Ukraine is a key piece of the overall war effort for Kiev.

After all, many Ukrainian citizens in eastern Ukraine can’t tell whether the artillery they are living under is fired from Ukrainian or Russian forces. And so long as they had access only to Russian television networks—which exclusively painted Ukrainian forces as the aggressor and, consequently, responsible for all civilian casualties—public opinion toward Ukraine’s central government was under an endless stress test as the war dragged on.

Now, with Ukraine able to defend itself on the airwaves, Russia has lost a potent weapon to turn the citizens of eastern Ukraine against their own government.

Similarly, U.S. lawmakers have debated how to defend the U.S. population against Kremlin-backed news outlets, including RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik, which U.S. officials have called out as Russian propaganda mouthpieces.

The FBI reportedly has turned to a U.S. law intended to prevent the spread of Nazi propaganda to determine whether the two Russian media outlets should register as foreign agents.

In America, as has been the case in Ukraine, manipulation of the media by a foreign power increasingly is regarded as a hostile act warranting retaliation.

“America has experienced a sustained attempt by a hostile power to feed and exploit our country’s division,” former President George W. Bush said in an Oct. 19 speech in New York.

Russia “has made a project of turning Americans against each other,” Bush said, adding, “Foreign aggressions, including cyberattacks, disinformation, and financial influence, should never be downplayed or tolerated.”

Nolan Peterson, a former special operations pilot and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is The Daily Signal’s foreign correspondent based in Ukraine.

A surprising find he made when searching the data of the world for answers was for India.

This was a search he was proud of finding – the number one search in India is “my husband wants me to breastfeed him.”

Indian newspapers followed up his finding and interviewed people about the search.

All those interviewed said it was untrue and that Mr Stephens-Davidowitz was crazy.

The data he analyses, he said, can be used to potentially predict certain events.

Google searches for the likes of “kill Muslims” can be cross-related to where hate crimes are committed.

When former US president Barack Obama tried to cool religious tensions after the San Bernardino shootings in which Muslims were the killers, searches for “kill Muslims” went up.

When Obama told people about what Muslims had done for the country and their successes, the searches dropped and curiosity took place.

For weeks after his speech the top searches were for Muslim athletes and other Muslim accomplishments.

The search data could be used to predict health problems, too.

Those at a high risk for pancreatic cancer searched for both chest pain and heart burn.

The searches separately were not a good enough indicator.

WLTH presents What Google can tell us about who we really are: A window into the human psyche with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, in partnership with the Brisbane Times, as part of James Street’s RESORT series.

“The technologies can capture what people are thinking at a particular moment,” Albright told me, “and serve it back to them over and over again.” And with the benefit of psychographic profiling, he adds, they’re able to deliver “content on an individual basis on Twitter and Facebook feeds where people are being grabbed and pulled in certain directions through certain types of posts and stories.

T he British are now looking into whether President Vladimir Putin’s Russia intervened in the United Kingdom’s June 2016 referendum on continued membership in the European Union. The “Brexit” won by about 52 percent, but it’s unclear whether Russian interference in the affair, through social media buys or other means, made a difference. Many people in Britain long have had reservations about integration and complaints about the EU, so the outcome did not come as a shot from the dark.

At the same time, Russia was in favor of Britain’s leaving the EU as a means of putting the cat among the pigeons for EU members, which include once-satellites of the former Soviet Union.

Russia has also interfered in recent elections in France, Germany and the United States. It has showed itself capable of weighing in both through media and through technological capacities in the field of communications, hacking into inner-party communications and, less clearly, voting mechanisms. This is troubling to the affected nations, but it must be kept in mind that governments the world over, including various U.S. administrations, have often tried to meddle in others’ internal affairs.

In the United States there are still underway investigations into the role of Russia in the 2016 elections. The most vigorous of these is led by special counsel and former FBI head Robert S. Mueller 3rd, but there are less reliable, more politicized inquiries being carried out by the Senate and House of Representatives Intelligence committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee. These risk being slow-rolled in spite of their importance due to possible links they are exploring between Trump campaign personnel and Russians.

Negotiations between British and EU representatives over Brexit, which still has the support of the British public, are giving the U.K.’s political leadership, including Prime Minister Theresa May, fits. One painful issue is how much the British will have to pay the EU, based on commitments it undertook during its membership, to get out. Another is the new situation in terms of rights of British citizens in remaining EU members and other EU member countries’ citizens in Britain.

Another knotty question is what the new, post-Brexit situation will be at the border between Ireland, which will remain an EU member, and Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom but a part whose population voted against Brexit. That border is now wide open. Its changed status, to the border between an EU member and a nonmember U.K., risks blowing up the famous 1998 Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland.

Another major problem in the evolving EU-British negotiations is that, given the shaky political situation inside and among the British political parties since the Conservatives lost May’s hastily called elections in June, EU countries and negotiators are not certain that the British government can deliver home approval on any agreement reached with them.

If nothing else, Putin has to be wringing his hands with glee at both the intra-British quarreling over Brexit and the tension occasioned by the negotiations over Brexit between the British and the rest of the Europeans — just as he must be smiling at the energy Americans continue to expend battling each other over Donald Trump’s election.

All of this plays into Russia’s hands and points up for Americans the necessity to get to the bottom of the mischief that Russia has been able so far to wreak in American politics, and the need to block it off before Americans go to the polls again.

Nations waged campaigns of influence against each other for centuries before Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and nothing is likely to stop them anytime soon.

Congress could mandate more “disclosure” for foreigners buying ads on U.S. social networks, but that wouldn’t stop the ads from being sold, nor would it address the covert part of the Russians’ playbook — the cyberattacks, snooping and dumping of embarrassing information.

This is cold comfort for policymakers now, but they’re only the latest group of leaders in Washington, D.C., to try to tackle this issue.

“Soviet intelligence officers have already started to collect information on the 1988 presidential candidates and their positions on various issues,” the FBI warned in a 1987 report.

“It is possible that the Soviet Union will institute a new series of active measures operations designed to discredit those candidates who have platforms that are not acceptable to the Soviet government,” the report also said.

The Bureau cited work it had already done in discrediting a forged Russian document from three years before.

“The forgery, dated 1947, purported that Ronald Reagan was working in collusion with the FBI and the House Committee on Un-American Activities concerning Communist infiltration into the Hollywood film world. This forgery was designed to discredit President Reagan by raising the issue of ‘McCarthyism’ during an election year,’ ” the report explained.

National security leaders and members of Congress in Washington have been hearing very similar mood music over the past year. Then-FBI Director James Comey is said to have grappled with a document that purportedly described then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch reassuring the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton that Lynch would go easy on them over Clinton’s emails and private server.

That document, which Comey and the FBI have declined to discuss, has been described as a U.S. intelligence intercept of Russian government message traffic. Comey knew it was fake, as The Washington Post reported, but it nonetheless muddied the waters he was trying to navigate and has since raised doubts about his decision.

For the authors of these active measures, that means a success — the way they always have.

“One way to think about Soviet efforts is to think of them as the activities of a giant political action committee,” said Robert M. Gates, then deputy director of the CIA for Intelligence. He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about active measures on Sept. 12, 1985, in a closed session that has since been partially declassified.

“This Soviet political action committee has an impressive set of resources,” Gates said. He continued: “A large budget; a cadre of experienced campaign strategists and activists; its own massive public relations organization; freedom from any constraints on disclosure of activities; willingness of those it opposes; and an ability to place covert agents within opposing organizations.”

Gates and his colleagues likely had had an easier time of it in their day. There was no global Internet with billions of users, no cyber-weapons and no social networks. The opponent they faced was actively interested in exporting its own political dogma.

Now, technology gives influence-mongers in any nation many orders of magnitude more avenues by which to spread their messages. And in the case of Russia, it no longer wants to convert capitalists into fellow travelers in the cause of Communism.

Instead, it has the simpler and potentially more pernicious goal of simply taking the West down a peg, sowing chaos and corroding faith in democracy.

“In the wake of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, it is more important than ever to strengthen our defenses against foreign interference in our elections,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., said in a statement earlier this month.

He and Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Mark Warner, D-Va., are sponsoring a bill that they say would help defeat some active measures. It would require that ads sold to foreign buyers on big social networks — especially Facebook — disclose who’d paid for them and that the social networks would have to disclose to anyone the content of the ads.

“I have long fought to increase transparency and end the corrupting influence of special interests in political campaigns, and I am confident this legislation will modernize existing law to safeguard the integrity of our election system,” McCain said as the introduced the bill.

But the bill wouldn’t do anything about automated Twitter accounts amplifying controversy, or foreign agitators organizing rallies, or cyberattacks or any of the other weapons at the disposal of contemporary agents of influence. And a foreign government doesn’t need to try to get inside the United States to raise doubts about events on the world scene.

Back in 1987, then-spymaster Gates told his Senate interlocutors about Moscow’s plan to raise doubts about the incident in which a Soviet interceptor shot down a Korean civilian airliner that strayed into Russian airspace, killing 269 people. There was no question that the Soviets had destroyed the aircraft, but as Gates said, the U.S.S.R. needed there to be.

“In some cases, all the Soviets are interested in is raising doubt about an issue,” he said, “the Soviets probably never realistically expected to reverse public opinion in their favor, but to create enough public doubt to make it responsible to voice the other side of the issue. And they did that.”

Moscow returned to the same playbook when it circulated alternate explanations for the 2014 destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was destroyed by a Russian surface-to-air missile fired from pro-Russian territory in Ukraine.

Leaders in D.C. approaching the end of the Cold War debated how much to worry about active measures and what action to take in response. One strategy was to attempt to fight disinformation with more information in publicly calling out forgeries or other false stories.

Gates told senators that it was “often difficult to determine the precise effects” of Russian influence activities and that the work of Russia’s intelligence and other agencies “do not guarantee success.”

That’s when Gates — who went on to become director of the CIA and secretary of defense — said something that resonates closely with life in Washington now: “In a close election or legislative battle, they can spell the difference.”

This week, a new thread emerged: Multiple sources confirmed to CNN that the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, contacted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in summer 2016 to ask for access to emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server. Sources told CNN that he asked for the emails because he wanted to catalog them on a searchable database that would be made available to the Trump campaign or a pro-Trump PAC.

There is no evidence WikiLeaks ever hacked or possessed the emails sought by Nix. But the contact alone raises new questions about Cambridge Analytica’s potential role in Russia’s efforts to undermine Clinton’s campaign.

It’s a messy situation and, with so many unanswered questions, such as what Cambridge Analytica knew about Wikileaks’ Russia connection when it sought Clinton’s missing emails. Still, it’s important to consider the broader context. The timeline below tracks how things unfolded, based on all we know.

that she used a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. She also said she deleted about 30,000 emails about personal matters unrelated to her work for the Obama administration. The deleted emails, which have never seen the light of day, later became a flashpoint of the campaign.

June 16, 2015 — Trump launches presidential campaign

, ending months of rampant speculation. “I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,” he told a crowd at Trump Tower. When he declared his candidacy, Trump was in the middle of the GOP pack, trailing in polls to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio and others.

July 2015 — Russian hackers breach DNC systems

Hackers working for Russian intelligence services “gained access to” the Democratic National Committee’s computer networks as part of the Kremlin’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential race, according to the

May 3, 2016 — Trump becomes presumptive Republican nominee

June 2016 — Mercer family endorses Trump

and starts donating to pro-Trump efforts. The family previously backed Cruz in the GOP primaries.

The family financially backs Cambridge Analytica, which started working for Trump over the summer of 2016. Some members of Cambridge Analytica staff were incorporated in the Trump campaign’s data operation team.

June 9, 2016 — Trump tweets about Clinton’s deleted emails

: “How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up–and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?”

This tweet came the same day that Donald Trump Jr., Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met a group of Russians at Trump Tower. Trump Jr. was told before the meeting that one of the Russians would offer incriminating information about Clinton.

June 15, 2016 — DNC claims it was hacked by Russian intelligence

The DNC and CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm it hired to investigate the breaches,

that Russia was behind the hacks, saying “we believe it was the DNC that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader. Too bad the DNC doesn’t hack Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails.”

July 19-21, 2016 — Republican National Convention is held in Cleveland

for the Republican Party during the Republican National Convention, which was held in Cleveland. During the convention, a handful of Trump campaign advisers briefly met with then-Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak.

Between July 21 and July 31, 2016 — Cambridge Analytica CEO emails WikiLeaks

so he could turn them into a searchable database for the campaign or a pro-Trump political action committee.There is no evidence that Clinton’s deleted emails were ever hacked or that WikiLeaks ever had possession of them.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the email was sent in late July 2016 at some point following the Republican National Convention. This was around the same time Cambridge Analytica started working for the Trump campaign as part of its three-pronged data operation based in San Antonio, Texas.

Right-wing firebrand Steve Bannon was a member of the Cambridge Analytica board when Nix sent the email, according to The New York Times. Bannon later became CEO of the Trump campaign and stepped down from the data analytics company. He took a top White House job in January but left over the summer.

July 22, 2016 — WikiLeaks releases about 20,000 hacked DNC emails

that were stolen from the DNC servers. Many of the emails were sent by senior DNC officials. Some of the emails suggested that the DNC favored Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primaries, leading to allegations that the primary was rigged.

July 25-28, 2016 — Democratic National Convention is held in Philadelphia

Democrats held their convention in Philadelphia and formally selected Clinton as their nominee. The gathering was roiled by the WikiLeaks disclosures, which were released days earlier. The emails upset Sanders supporters, and forced DNC chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wassermann Schultz to

July 26, 2016 — NYT reports that the US believes Russia hacked the DNC

that claimed US intelligence agencies told the White House that they were highly confident that the Russian government was responsible for hacking the DNC. This was the first public report suggesting that the US government agreed with the DNC’s assessment.

, Trump publicly called on the Russian government to hack Clinton’s private email server and reveal the deleted emails. Trump’s campaign later said his comment was a joke.

“if it is Russia — which it’s probably not, nobody knows who it is — but if it is Russia, it’s really bad for a different reason, because it shows how little respect they have for our country, when they would hack into a major party and get everything,” Trump said. “But it would be interesting to see — I will tell you this — Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next.”

July 29, 2016 — Trump campaign pays $100,000 to Cambridge Analytica

The Trump campaign made its first of five payments to Cambridge Analytica, cutting a check for $100,000, according to records from the Federal Election Commission.

August 8, 2016 — Roger Stone says he was in touch with Assange

, former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone claimed to be in touch with Assange and predicted upcoming WikiLeaks releases: “I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.” He later clarified that while he was in contact with Assange, it came through an intermediary.

August 14-17, 2016 — Stone exchanges messages with Russian hackers

with Guccifer 2.0, a self-proclaimed hacker who published stolen materials from the DNC earlier in the summer. (These DNC releases were separate from the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks.) The Twitter messages were about the contents of some of the stolen DNC materials that Guccifer posted online earlier that summer. Stone denies any wrongdoing or collusion.

Months after these Twitter messages, the US intelligence community announced that Guccifer 2.0 was actually run by Russian intelligence operatives as part of the Kremlin’s effort to meddle in the election.

August 18, 2016 — Trump campaign pays $250,000 to Cambridge Analytica

The Trump campaign made its second of five payments to Cambridge Analytica, cutting a check for $250,000, according to records from the Federal Election Commission.

August 21, 2016 — Stone predicts upcoming trouble for Podesta

Without specifically referencing emails, Stone predicts that Podesta will soon be in hot water. “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel,”

The Trump campaign made its second of five payments to Cambridge Analytica, cutting a check for $5 million, according to records from the Federal Election Commission. The massive payment — the largest from the campaign to the data firm — was for a TV ad buy, according to the

, Trump questioned the recent US intelligence statement that the Russian government was interfering in the 2016 election. “I think it’s probably unlikely,” Trump said. “I think maybe the Democrats are putting that out, who knows? But I think that it’s pretty unlikely.”

King’s show is broadcast on RT, the Kremlin-controlled news network that targets English-speaking audiences. The US intelligence community says the Kremlin promoted its election-meddling campaign on RT. The Trump campaign

with Guccifer 2.0. The emails were about the contents of some publicly released DNC materials. Stone denies wrongdoing or collusion. Months after these Twitter messages, the US intelligence community announced that Guccifer 2.0 was actually run by Russian intelligence operatives as part of the Kremlin’s effort to meddle in the election.

that WikiLeaks will release new Clinton emails. “I expect Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks people to drop a payload of new documents on Hillary on a weekly basis fairly soon. And that, of course, will answer the question of exactly what was erased on that email server.”

October 2, 2016 — Stone alludes to future WikiLeaks releases

Stone appeared to predict that WikiLeaks would soon post damaging materials about Clinton.

October 7, 2016 — US formally blames Russia for DNC hacks

about the DNC hack. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the entire US intelligence community, announced that the Russian government was behind the hacked emails released by WikiLeaks.

“The US Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations,” the statement said, adding that disclosures on WikiLeaks were consistent with Russian methods.

October 7, 2016 — WikiLeaks begins releasing Podesta emails

Shortly after the announcement blaming Russia for the DNC hacks, WikiLeaks

stolen from Podesta’s Gmail account. WikiLeaks went on to release new Podesta emails on a near-daily basis, creating waves of negative headlines for the Clinton campaign in the closing weeks of the election. Trump regularly cited the latest Podesta releases during campaign rallies in October and November. The US government later said Russia was responsible for the hacks.

October 10, 2016 — Trump says “I love WikiLeaks”

At a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump expressed his admiration for the anti-secrecy website that was publishing dirt on his Democratic opponent, saying “This just came out. WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks.”

October 12, 2016 — Stone says he has back-channel communications with Assange

Stone further elaborated on his relationship with Assange in an interview with a local CBS station in Miami. “I do have a back-channel communication with Assange, because we have a good mutual friend,” Stone said. “That friend travels back and forth from the United States to London and we talk.” Stone says he has never actually met with Assange or spoken with him directly.

The Trump campaign made its fourth of five payments to Cambridge Analytica, cutting a check for $250,000, according to records from the Federal Election Commission.

November 8, 2016 — Trump wins US presidential election

To the surprise of most political analysts, Trump beats Clinton to win the US presidential election. His narrow victory in the Electoral College was buoyed by wins in Midwestern states that weren’t expected to go his way.

With the presidential transition underway, the Trump campaign made its final payment to Cambridge Analytica, cutting a check for $312,500, according to records from the Federal Election Commission. In all, the data firm collected more than $5.9 million from Trump’s presidential campaign.

January 6, 2017 — US accuses Russia of meddling in the election

The US intelligence community accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of orchestrating a multi-faceted campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Going beyond the October statement,

Documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released by the National Archives this week. Historians and researchers are still sifting through the thousands of files released to find new revelations. Author of “The Kennedy Half Century” and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia Larry Sabato joined CBSN to discuss the new information.

Get new episodes of shows you love across devices the next day, stream local news live, and watch full seasons of CBS fan favorites anytime, anywhere with CBS All Access. Try it free! http://bit.ly/1OQA29B

—
CBSN is the first digital streaming news network that will allow Internet-connected consumers to watch live, anchored news coverage on their connected TV and other devices. At launch, the network is available 24/7 and makes all of the resources of CBS News available directly on digital platforms with live, anchored coverage 15 hours each weekday. CBSN. Always On.

Lawyers from Twitter, Facebook and Google will meet with congressional investigators to talk about the role they played in Russia’s attempt to influence last year’s election. Heather Timmons, White House correspondent for Quartz, talks about what we should expect in the Nov. 1 hearing.

Get new episodes of shows you love across devices the next day, stream local news live, and watch full seasons of CBS fan favorites anytime, anywhere with CBS All Access. Try it free! http://bit.ly/1OQA29B

—
CBSN is the first digital streaming news network that will allow Internet-connected consumers to watch live, anchored news coverage on their connected TV and other devices. At launch, the network is available 24/7 and makes all of the resources of CBS News available directly on digital platforms with live, anchored coverage 15 hours each weekday. CBSN. Always On.

The Reich Citizens Movement is a far-right group based on the idea that Germany’s pre-World War II borders still exist.
And it also refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the German government and the nation’s laws.
The organization, which until recently had not been taken seriously, now has 15,000 members, and is considered as a very real threat to German security.

Mark Zuckerberg is trying hard to convince voters that Facebook had no nefarious role in this election. But according to President-elect Donald Trump’s digital director Brad Parscale, the social media giant was massively influential—not because it was tipping the scales with fake news, but because it helped generate the bulk of the campaign’s $250 million in online fundraising.

“Our biggest incubator that allowed us to generate that money was Facebook,” says Parscale, who has been working for the campaign since before Trump officially announced his candidacy a year and a half ago. Over the course of the election cycle, Trump’s campaign funneled $90 million to Parscale’s San Antonio-based firm, most of which went toward digital advertising. And Parscale says more of that ad money went to Facebook than to any other platform.

‘Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing.’

Brad Parscale

“Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing,” he says. “Twitter for Mr. Trump. And Facebook for fundraising.”

In the wake of Trump’s stunning upset last week, media analysts have worked feverishly to figure out how social media may have altered the outcome of this election. They—and we—have pointed to online echo chambers and the proliferation of fake news as the building blocks of Trump’s victory. But the answer may be much simpler. Of course Facebook was hugely influential in the presidential election, in large part because Trump’s campaign embraced Facebook as a key advertising channel in a way that no presidential campaign has before—not even Clinton’s.

“I think the Trump campaign did that extremely well,” says Andrew Bleeker, president of Bully Pulpit Interactive, which helped lead Hillary Clinton’s digital marketing efforts. “They spent a higher percentage of their spending on digital than we did.”

Changing Minds Where It Mattered

Throughout the last year-and-a-half, stories about the imbalance between Clinton’s ad spending compared to Trump’s proliferated. They noted how Clinton spent more than $200 million on television ads in the final months of the election while Trump spent less than half that. Because Trump wasn’t spending as much on television all along, it seemed like his team wasn’t investing in changing anyone’s minds. But they were: they were just doing it online.

“The big takeaway was using digital in a digital-first way,” says Matt Lira, a Republican digital strategist and senior advisor to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “It was the main course. It wasn’t leftovers.”

Facebook proved to be a powerful way for Trump’s team to hone the campaign’s message with the kind of enormous sample sizes you can’t get with traditional polling. “They have an advantage of a platform that has users that are conditioned to click and engage and give you feedback,” says Gary Coby, director of advertising at the Republican National Committee, who worked on Trump’s campaign. “Their platform’s built to inform you about what people like and dislike.”

Coby’s team took full advantage of the ability to perform massive tests with its ads. On any given day, Coby says, the campaign was running 40,000 to 50,000 variants of its ads, testing how they performed in different formats, with subtitles and without, and static versus video, among other small differences. On the day of the third presidential debate in October, the team ran 175,000 variations. Coby calls this approach “A/B testing on steroids.” The more variations the team was able to produce, Coby says, the higher the likelihood that its ads would actually be served to Facebook users.

“Every ad network and platform wants to serve the ad that’s going to get the most engagement,” Coby says. “The more you’re testing, the more opportunity you have to find the best setup.”

The Digital Bully Pulpit

Clinton also had a robust digital strategy, investing $30 million in digital ads in the homestretch. Her campaign produced thousands of rapid-response videos and set up a customer service team to help people with their voting questions. But, says Bleeker, “the Trump campaign took to an extreme what we were trying to do on the Hillary campaign.”

The President-elect has shown he can turn a news cycle in 140 characters or less.

Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel. It wasn’t a platform for broadcasting pre-planned messages but for interacting with supporters and starting new conversations—however controversial those conversations often were. Bleeker says one of the biggest lessons he’s learned from this election cycle is that social media is increasingly going to be part of any candidate’s so-called “earned media strategy”—that is, the coverage a candidate gets for free in the press. The President-elect has shown he can turn a news cycle in 140 characters or less; in a recent 60 Minutes interview, he said he plans to continue using Twitter as president.

“He’s going to tell his side of the story from the digital bully pulpit,” Lira says.

Whether fake news did or didn’t affect the election’s outcome, Facebook as a platform did. The winning candidate was not just willing, but eager to break with traditional models of campaigning. His team invested in new ways of using the digital tools and platforms that have come to dominate the media landscape. Anyone who wants to defeat him in the future will have to do the same.

Washington • Donald Trump’s presidential campaign relied on more hands-on help from tech firms during the 2016 election than previously thought, using teams from Facebook, Twitter and others as almost entrenched political operatives, a new study by a University of Utah professor and a colleague found.

While social media and other tech companies routinely work with large advertisers, including political campaigns, the study shows that Trump’s team looked at the Silicon Valley employees as almost its own in pushing its online strategy to woo voters. Hillary Clinton’s campaign built its own digital effort and didn’t rely on the tech companies help to the same degree.

“These firms had some of their staffers working inside the Trump campaign digital offices during the general election,” said one of the study’s authors, Shannon McGregor, an assistant professor at the U.’s Department of Communication. “This was something that was much more routine than we had known before. This was offered to all campaigns, but it was unequally taken up. The Trump campaign, relatively as compared to the Clinton campaign, was understaffed and made much greater use of these staffers than the folks on the Clinton campaign.”

McGregor, who wrote the study with Daniel Kreiss, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says the findings have raised concerns about whether the help offered the campaigns could be construed as in-kind contributions from corporations and whether new laws are needed to make public such efforts.

The peer-reviewed study, published Thursday in the journal Political Communication, relied on interviews with the Silicon Valley liaisons to the Trump and Clinton campaigns as well as other would-be White House hopefuls.

“What we found in the course of these interviews is that these technology firms offer this digital subsidies, basically, to campaigns,” McGregor said. “It goes beyond just trying to facilitate ad buys. [It includes] shaping the conversation through this sort of close collaboration.”

That included helping to target voters and form campaign messaging.

“Facebook, Twitter and Google go beyond promoting their services and facilitating digital advertising buys, actively shaping campaign communication through their close collaboration with political staffers,” the study reported. “We show how representatives at these firms serve as quasi-digital consultants to campaigns, shaping digital strategy, content and execution.”

Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale, had hinted at such an effort during an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” earlier this month, saying he had sought out the help from tech companies.

“I wanna know everything you would tell Hillary’s campaign plus some,” he told the news program. “And I want your people here to teach me how to use it.”

Adam Sharp, Twitter’s head of news, government and elections through the end of 2016, said that he believes Parscale’s interpretation of how the help from tech companies worked is an “exaggeration.”

“Ultimately, my understanding is that every company offered equivalent services to each campaign and the campaigns can choose how much or how little of that support they wish to utilize,” Sharp said in an interview, noting that such services have been provided to presidential campaigns since many of the companies were founded.

He noted that because campaigns can choose how much help they get, it can create “optical challenges” but defended the outreach as a boon to candidates and their ability to communicate with potential voters.

“More broadly, I believe that anything that brings candidates and elected officials closer to their constituents, making them more available for direct interaction and direct questioning by the voters is a good thing,” Sharp said. “And I think all the companies in creating these teams to reach out to candidates and bring them into the conversation, to bring them out of the comfort of the TV studios into a space where they can have this direct interaction with users is potentially a positive thing for the democratic process.”

A Facebook spokesman said Thursday the company offers all candidates and interest groups “equal levels of support, no matter their political affiliation.”

“It’s up them to decide how much help they want,” the representative said. “But this is key: The campaigns make their own strategic decisions about how to use Facebook’s platform.”

That extends to guidance on how to use the social media site, the representative noted, as well as addressing technical issues and advertising.

McGregor says the research into the tech companies’ assistance with the campaigns shows the firms have built “basically a partisan structure,” hiring former Republican and Democratic campaign aides to help boost relationships with current challengers in a way that goes far beyond a tech company soliciting ad buys.

She added the advent of social media and technology in political campaigns has opened a whole new field of political research that needs to be done to show the public just how modern efforts to sway voters are operating.

“One of the most important takeaways is that this is just the beginning,” she said. “There needs to be more examination about this, given this is quite routine.”

Donald Trump’s campaign blatantly downplayed the role data firm Cambridge Analytics played in helping the president win last year and even ignored the campaign’s own boasts following the election after the firm was linked to a collusion effort with Russians.

Earlier this week, it was reported Cambridge Analytica’s top executive Alexander Nix directly reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an effort to get Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails, according to The Daily Beast.

WikiLeaks had been accused of receiving the damning Democratic National Committee emails from Russia, which posed another avenue for the president’s critics to lambast him with accusations of collusion with the Russians to secure the Oval Office.

Assange later confirmed Nix’s overture – made prior to Election Day last year – on Twitter but stated that WikiLeaks turned him down.

Michael Glassner, the executive director of Trump’s campaign, issued a statement to CNN that declared the Republican National Committee was solely responsible for the campaign’s analytics.

“Once President Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee on data analytics,” he said. “Leading into the election, the R.N.C. had invested in the most sophisticated data-targeting program in modern American history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. We were proud to have worked with the R.N.C. and its data experts and relied on them as our main source for data analytics.”

Glassner also flatly denied any other source played as crucial a role in data analysis when he added: “Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false.”

CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix speaks at the 2016 Concordia Summit – Day 1 at Grand Hyatt New York on September 19, 2016 in New York City. Getty Images/Bryan Bedder

Indeed, the Trump campaign paid the UK-based firm backed by billionaire and heavy political donor Robert Mercer millions during the home stretch of the 2016 run, and following Trump’s victory current White House senior adviser and husband to Trump’s eldest daughter Jared Kushner thoroughly explained the operation and how much the campaign relied on it.

Cambridge Analytica also chimed in with a glowing statement touting its efforts in the campaign.

Firstly, the campaign money trail clearly showed Cambridge Analytica received big bucks from Donald Trump for President, the campaign’s main finance hub. Starting with an initial payment of $100,000 in July 2016, the firm took in more than $5.9 million in five payments total, including $5 million paid out in September 2016, according to FEC records.

The five expenditure descriptions from the Trump campaign’s FEC filings list the payments made for data management or data management services.

Fourteen days after the election in November, Kushner then adorned the cover of Forbes magazine and expounded on the data analytics program he headed up. He specifically said the work was meant to “complement the RNC’s data hub.”

“After the primary, we started ramping up because we knew that doing a national campaign is different than doing a primary campaign,” Kushner told Forbes. “That was when we formalized the system because we had to ramp up for digital fundraising. We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff. Doing it state by state is not that hard. But scaling is a very, very hard thing. They gave me a lot of their subcontractors and I built in Austin a data hub that would complement the RNC’s data hub. ”

Even before Kushner’s comments, Cambridge Analytica’s top executive, Alexander Nix, boasted of his firm’s work for Trump. One day after Trump won.

“We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communications played such an integral part in President-election Donald Trump’s extraordinary win,” Nix said as part of a company statement.

Here come the chargesVICE News
The special investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election has yielded its first charges, according to CNN, and the unnamed defendant or defendants will reportedly be taken into custody Monday. Aside from the skeletal report, not much is …and more »

UPDATE – Wikileaks confirms approach from Trump campaignUpperMichigansSource.com
The editor of Wikileaks is confirming that the group was approached by a data firm working for President Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election. Julian Assange says on Twitter that Cambridge Analytica reached out to his group prior to last …and more »

Trump campaign data firm linked to Julian Assange: reportWashington TimesCambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix reached out to Mr. Assange in an attempt to recover and release about 33,000 emails that were erased from Mrs. Clinton’s private email server from when she was secretary of state, the Daily Beast reported.

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The U.S. State Department has provided Congress with a list of Russian companies and intelligence agencies that are likely to be hit with sanctions under a new U.S. law punishing Russia for allegedly meddling in last year’s presidential election.

The British are now looking into whether President Vladimir Putin’s Russia intervened in the United Kingdom’s June 2016 referendum on continued membership in the European Union.

The “Brexit” won by about 52 percent, but it’s unclear whether Russian interference in the affair, through social media buys or other means, made a difference.

Many people in Britain long have had reservations about integration and complaints about the EU, so the outcome did not come as a shot from the dark.

At the same time, Russia was in favor of Britain’s leaving the EU as a means of putting the cat among the pigeons for EU members, which include once-satellites of the former Soviet Union.

Russia has also interfered in recent elections in France, Germany and the United States. It has showed itself capable of weighing in both through media and through technological capacities in the field of communications, hacking into inner-party communications and, less clearly, voting mechanisms. This is troubling to the affected nations, but it must be kept in mind that governments the world over, including various U.S. administrations, have often tried to meddle in others’ internal affairs.

In the United States there are still underway investigations into the role of Russia in the 2016 elections. The most vigorous of these is led by special counsel and former FBI head Robert S. Mueller 3rd, but there are less reliable, more politicized inquiries being carried out by the Senate and House of Representatives Intelligence committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee. These risk being slow-rolled in spite of their importance due to possible links they are exploring between Trump campaign personnel and Russians.

Negotiations between British and EU representatives over Brexit, which still has the support of the British public, are giving the U.K.’s political leadership, including Prime Minister Theresa May, fits. One painful issue is how much the British will have to pay the EU, based on commitments it undertook during its membership, to get out. Another is the new situation in terms of rights of British citizens in remaining EU members and other EU member countries’ citizens in Britain.

Another knotty question is what the new, post-Brexit situation will be at the border between Ireland, which will remain an EU member, and Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom but a part whose population voted against Brexit. That border is now wide open. Its changed status, to the border between an EU member and a nonmember U.K., risks blowing up the famous 1998 Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland.

Another major problem in the evolving EU-British negotiations is that, given the shaky political situation inside and among the British political parties since the Conservatives lost May’s hastily called elections in June, EU countries and negotiators are not certain that the British government can deliver home approval on any agreement reached with them.

If nothing else, Putin has to be wringing his hands with glee at both the intra-British quarreling over Brexit and the tension occasioned by the negotiations over Brexit between the British and the rest of the Europeans — just as he must be smiling at the energy Americans continue to expend battling each other over Donald Trump’s election.

All of this plays into Russia’s hands and points up for Americans the necessity to get to the bottom of the mischief that Russia has been able so far to wreak in American politics, and the need to block it off before Americans go to the polls again.

Nations waged campaigns of influence against each other for centuries before Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and nothing is likely to stop them anytime soon.

Congress could mandate more “disclosure” for foreigners buying ads on U.S. social networks, but that wouldn’t stop the ads from being sold, nor would it address the covert part of the Russians’ playbook — the cyberattacks, snooping and dumping of embarrassing information.

This is cold comfort for policymakers now, but they’re only the latest group of leaders in Washington, D.C., to try to tackle this issue.

“Soviet intelligence officers have already started to collect information on the 1988 presidential candidates and their positions on various issues,” the FBI warned in a 1987 report.

“It is possible that the Soviet Union will institute a new series of active measures operations designed to discredit those candidates who have platforms that are not acceptable to the Soviet government,” the report also said.

The Bureau cited work it had already done in discrediting a forged Russian document from three years before.

“The forgery, dated 1947, purported that Ronald Reagan was working in collusion with the FBI and the House Committee on Un-American Activities concerning Communist infiltration into the Hollywood film world. This forgery was designed to discredit President Reagan by raising the issue of ‘McCarthyism’ during an election year,’ ” the report explained.

National security leaders and members of Congress in Washington have been hearing very similar mood music over the past year. Then-FBI Director James Comey is said to have grappled with a document that purportedly described then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch reassuring the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton that Lynch would go easy on them over Clinton’s emails and private server.

That document, which Comey and the FBI have declined to discuss, has been described as a U.S. intelligence intercept of Russian government message traffic. Comey knew it was fake, as The Washington Post reported, but it nonetheless muddied the waters he was trying to navigate and has since raised doubts about his decision.

For the authors of these active measures, that means a success — the way they always have.

“One way to think about Soviet efforts is to think of them as the activities of a giant political action committee,” said Robert M. Gates, then deputy director of the CIA for Intelligence. He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about active measures on Sept. 12, 1985, in a closed session that has since been partially declassified.

“This Soviet political action committee has an impressive set of resources,” Gates said. He continued: “A large budget; a cadre of experienced campaign strategists and activists; its own massive public relations organization; freedom from any constraints on disclosure of activities; willingness of those it opposes; and an ability to place covert agents within opposing organizations.”

Gates and his colleagues likely had had an easier time of it in their day. There was no global Internet with billions of users, no cyber-weapons and no social networks. The opponent they faced was actively interested in exporting its own political dogma.

Now, technology gives influence-mongers in any nation many orders of magnitude more avenues by which to spread their messages. And in the case of Russia, it no longer wants to convert capitalists into fellow travelers in the cause of Communism.

Instead, it has the simpler and potentially more pernicious goal of simply taking the West down a peg, sowing chaos and corroding faith in democracy.

“In the wake of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, it is more important than ever to strengthen our defenses against foreign interference in our elections,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., said in a statement earlier this month.

He and Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Mark Warner, D-Va., are sponsoring a bill that they say would help defeat some active measures. It would require that ads sold to foreign buyers on big social networks — especially Facebook — disclose who’d paid for them and that the social networks would have to disclose to anyone the content of the ads.

“I have long fought to increase transparency and end the corrupting influence of special interests in political campaigns, and I am confident this legislation will modernize existing law to safeguard the integrity of our election system,” McCain said as the introduced the bill.

But the bill wouldn’t do anything about automated Twitter accounts amplifying controversy, or foreign agitators organizing rallies, or cyberattacks or any of the other weapons at the disposal of contemporary agents of influence. And a foreign government doesn’t need to try to get inside the United States to raise doubts about events on the world scene.

Back in 1987, then-spymaster Gates told his Senate interlocutors about Moscow’s plan to raise doubts about the incident in which a Soviet interceptor shot down a Korean civilian airliner that strayed into Russian airspace, killing 269 people. There was no question that the Soviets had destroyed the aircraft, but as Gates said, the U.S.S.R. needed there to be.

“In some cases, all the Soviets are interested in is raising doubt about an issue,” he said, “the Soviets probably never realistically expected to reverse public opinion in their favor, but to create enough public doubt to make it responsible to voice the other side of the issue. And they did that.”

Moscow returned to the same playbook when it circulated alternate explanations for the 2014 destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was destroyed by a Russian surface-to-air missile fired from pro-Russian territory in Ukraine.

Leaders in D.C. approaching the end of the Cold War debated how much to worry about active measures and what action to take in response. One strategy was to attempt to fight disinformation with more information in publicly calling out forgeries or other false stories.

Gates told senators that it was “often difficult to determine the precise effects” of Russian influence activities and that the work of Russia’s intelligence and other agencies “do not guarantee success.”

That’s when Gates — who went on to become director of the CIA and secretary of defense — said something that resonates closely with life in Washington now: “In a close election or legislative battle, they can spell the difference.”

This week, a new thread emerged: Multiple sources confirmed to CNN that the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, contacted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in summer 2016 to ask for access to emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server. Sources told CNN that he asked for the emails because he wanted to catalog them on a searchable database that would be made available to the Trump campaign or a pro-Trump PAC.

There is no evidence WikiLeaks ever hacked or possessed the emails sought by Nix. But the contact alone raises new questions about Cambridge Analytica’s potential role in Russia’s efforts to undermine Clinton’s campaign.

It’s a messy situation and, with so many unanswered questions, such as what Cambridge Analytica knew about Wikileaks’ Russia connection when it sought Clinton’s missing emails. Still, it’s important to consider the broader context. The timeline below tracks how things unfolded, based on all we know.

that she used a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. She also said she deleted about 30,000 emails about personal matters unrelated to her work for the Obama administration. The deleted emails, which have never seen the light of day, later became a flashpoint of the campaign.

June 16, 2015 — Trump launches presidential campaign

, ending months of rampant speculation. “I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,” he told a crowd at Trump Tower. When he declared his candidacy, Trump was in the middle of the GOP pack, trailing in polls to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio and others.

July 2015 — Russian hackers breach DNC systems

Hackers working for Russian intelligence services “gained access to” the Democratic National Committee’s computer networks as part of the Kremlin’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential race, according to the